Mike Nichols has directed some classics (Catch 22, The Graduate, Working Girl) and some turkeys (Wolf, Regarding Henry). With Closer he returns to a chamber piece similar to his first feature, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, which also dealt with couples trapped in dysfunctional relationships.
Closer, based on Patrick Marber’s play, is set in contemporary London and spans a period of four years. There are time gaps in the narrative during which important things happen, and you have to pay attention to what the actors say to understand the characters’ changed circumstances. The style of the movie is very mannered and theatrical.
The story gets underway with Alice (Natalie Portman), a New York stripper, arriving in London and being slightly injured when she steps in front of a moving taxi. A stranger named Dan (Jude Law) comes to her aid, and she moves in with him.
Sometime later, Dan’s book based on Alice is being prepared for publication, and when he gets his picture taken for the jacket, he meets the photographer Anna (Julia Roberts). He and Anna exchange a few kisses, but she declines to get involved with him because he is living with Alice.
Later still, Dan is in an Internet chat room called “London Sex Anon,” pretending to be Anna. He directs the person he is chatting with to a place where Anna had mentioned spending lots of time, and that’s how she meets the dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen). Soon Anna and Larry become a couple, and from there, the movie takes off in directions you won’t see coming.
The minimalism of Marber’s dialog and structure—there’s almost no one else in Closer except these four—certainly helps the director’s sleek rigor, but Nichols and his actors also redeem some of Marber’s occasionally stiff notions of conversation. Owen must muster all his frowzy, stubbled charm, for example, to toss off an aperçu such as “She has the moronic beauty of youth,” and I’m still not sure I wouldn’t just giggle if someone said that to me. Especially about Natalie Portman. Portman herself is wonderfully wounded and bitter. All that advance publicity about her randy men’s-club dancing scenes, how Nichols shot her nekkid but she doesn’t go-go all-nude here, just gets in the way of appreciating her true achievement: She’s angry and alluring even when she’s in nothing but a G-string and a pink wig. Though, y’know, Natalie in the buff wouldn’t exactly be a bad thing.
As for the men, Law caps his ceaseless season of releases with the anti-Alfie: Law makes this guy’s desperate, vacillating love for both Anna and Alice the poignant dither of a sniveling conniver. Owen has a showier part than Law (Owen played Law’s part on the stage, so perhaps he knew better how to upstage his co-star), and his brute energy makes us enjoy nearly every one of Dr. Larry’s brash pronouncements about love and sex.
Closer is marred by some drippy music courtesy of Damien Rice and a small-surprise ending that feels like gimmicky irony. But the film’s core idea is compelling: The four lives that contort to become closer end up further apart, and in immense pain. The perpetual pursuit of love, when practiced by adults instead of adolescents, can lead to something worse than mere heartbreak: enduring heartache.